Dr Jo Abbott - PhD

Dr Jo Abbott - PhD Whole-body care.

Clinical Biomechanist | Anatomist | Nutritionist | MSK Researcher
Founder of HODA-A™ — redefining hands-on MSK assessment
Creator of the Back Pain Systems™ App for lasting pain relief
Science-led.

Here's something that might change how you think about your own hands-on skills. 📚The word "palpation" is doing too much...
17/06/2026

Here's something that might change how you think about your own hands-on skills. 📚
The word "palpation" is doing too much work.

One word covers SO many different things that clinicians do with their hands:
🧠 Passively receiving touch and sensing what the tissue tells you
🔍 Actively exploring tissue properties — testing different pressures, angles, speeds
✋ Discriminating between normal and abnormal findings
📊 Assessing one area vs another area
💊 Delivering treatment
💬 Communicating with the patient through touch

All of this gets called "palpation."

But here's the thing: These aren't all the same skill. They each require different training. They each demand something different from your nervous system. They each produce different outcomes.

And because they all share one vague name, we often treat them like they're the same thing.
What happens when one word covers too much?

Your thinking gets blurry. You can't think clearly about something you can't name precisely.
Your training gets confused. How do you improve a skill when you're not sure what you're actually training?
Your research becomes unreliable. "Palpation studies" are measuring different things across different clinicians, because palpation means different things to different people.

This is where precise terminology matters.

HODA-A™ separates what "palpation" lumps together.

Passive touch vs active touch — they have names. Sensing vs discriminating — they're different processes. Assessment vs treatment vs communication — they're recognized as distinct roles, each with different demands.

When you can name something precisely, you can think about it clearly. When you can think about it clearly, you can train it systematically. When you can train it systematically, you can measure it accurately.

This is precision in clinical practice. 🎯

Better language creates better measurement science.

Week 5 of 10: The Science Behind the Hands.

Think about this: What would you like to name more clearly in your own practice? What skills have you been lumping together that might actually be separate? Drop a comment 👇

drjoabbott.com/hoda-a 🎯 Follow for Week 6

Here's something that changes everything about how we think about hands-on therapy. 🧠Most of us learned to focus on one ...
10/06/2026

Here's something that changes everything about how we think about hands-on therapy. 🧠

Most of us learned to focus on one side of the equation or the other.
- Either: What does touch do for the patient? Pain relief. Emotional safety. Body awareness. 👐
- Or: What does the clinician perceive? Tissue properties. Restrictions. Nervous system state. 🔍

But what if they're not separate things? What if they're actually the same conversation happening from two different viewpoints?
Two nervous systems. One room. Constant interaction.

The patient's nervous system is receiving touch and responding to it. Their responses are data — muscular, emotional, perceptual.
The clinician's nervous system is perceiving that touch and gathering information. The clinician senses tissue, explores it, discriminates between normal and abnormal, and adapts based on what they feel.

But here's the key: They're talking to each other the whole time.

The clinician touches. The patient responds. The clinician reads that response. The clinician adjusts. The patient responds to the adjustment. The clinician perceives that new response.

This feedback loop IS the clinical conversation. 💬

You can't measure one side without understanding the other. They're one system with two participants.

If your training only focused on what happens in the patient, you missed half the picture.
If your training only focused on what the clinician perceives, you lost the connection to the patient's experience.
Both matter. Both are measurable. Both are trainable.

This is Week 4 of 10: The Science Behind the Hands.

Everything changes when you understand the interaction.

Think about your own training — were you taught to see these two sides as connected, or as separate? 👇
Drop a comment. Let's talk about this.

drjoabbott.com/hoda-a 🎯 Follow for Week 5

Delighted to be presenting for Rob Granter and the Australasian College of Soft Tissue Therapy next month.Why Palpation ...
06/06/2026

Delighted to be presenting for Rob Granter and the Australasian College of Soft Tissue Therapy next month.

Why Palpation Hasn't Failed: The Missing Science Behind Skilled Hands, Clinical Reliability and HODA-A™

Manual therapists are often told that palpation is unreliable. But what if the research failed to properly calibrate the clinician as the measurement instrument before testing them?

This live webinar unpacks that question — and introduces a more rigorous, evidence-informed language for what skilled hands are actually doing.

Open to all manual therapists, movement practitioners, physiotherapists, osteopaths, chiropractors and hands-on clinicians worldwide.

Register here 👉 https://softtissuetherapy.aweb.page/exceptional-webinar-palpation-science

23 June · 9.30am BST / 6.30pm Melbourne

Have you ever been told to stop using your thumbs? 🤲Today I ran the live kick-off for the very first HODA-A™ Level 1 coh...
03/06/2026

Have you ever been told to stop using your thumbs? 🤲

Today I ran the live kick-off for the very first HODA-A™ Level 1 cohort — and honestly, most of it wasn't about giving answers. It was about the questions good clinicians quietly carry but rarely say aloud:

Do some days feel like your hands just can't find the information — same patient, same hands, and nothing lines up?
Do you assess differently when you're stressed than when you're calm?
Are you ever unsure whether it's the nerve, the joint, or something else altogether?

If any of these feel familiar — you're not doing it wrong. You're starting to notice the instrument doing the measuring. 🙌
And that's exactly where HODA-A™ begins.

Something important is missing from the conversation about therapeutic touch — and understanding it changes how you prac...
03/06/2026

Something important is missing from the conversation about therapeutic touch — and understanding it changes how you practice.

Most of the research and training out there focuses on one side of the equation: What happens in the patient when they're touched.

But what about what touch does IN the clinician?

Active touch. The clinician touches. Their nervous system is actively exploring, perceiving, discriminating, adapting.

Let's break this down:
👐 Sensing. Your hands have thousands of mechanoreceptors in the fingertips. They're detecting pressure, vibration, texture, temperature, resistance. Every touch is gathering data.

🔍 Exploring. You're not passively receiving information. You're actively testing. Different pressures. Different angles. Different speeds. Each one tells you something new: "This is different from that."

🧠 Discriminating. Your nervous system is processing this data in real time. Normal versus abnormal. Mobile versus restricted. Compliant versus guarded. Your hands are constantly making distinctions.

✋ Adapting. Based on what you perceive, you adjust. Different pressure. Different angle. Different speed. Every perception leads to a decision. Every decision changes what happens next.

Here's the key insight: Your hands are not just tools. They are instruments of measurement.

And instruments need to be calibrated. That's what HODA-A™ teaches.

This is Week 3 of 10: The Science Behind the Hands.

Think about your own clinical training — what have you been taught about measuring and calibrating YOUR nervous system as the assessment tool? 👇
Drop a comment. Let's build this conversation together.

drjoabbott.com/hoda-a 🎯 Follow for Week 4

Something important is getting lost in the conversation about therapeutic touch — and understanding it changes how we pr...
27/05/2026

Something important is getting lost in the conversation about therapeutic touch — and understanding it changes how we practise. 🧠

Most research focuses on one side of the equation: What happens in the patient when they're touched?

And the science is compelling.

**Passive touch** — when the patient is touched. Their nervous system receives, interprets, and responds.

Three things happen at the same time:

1️⃣ **Pain modulation.** Touch changes how pain is perceived. The nervous system actively downregulates pain signals. This is real neuroscience.

2️⃣ **Affective response.** Touch activates safety signals. The nervous system shifts toward regulation. Trust improves. This is measurable.

3️⃣ **Somatoperceptual shift.** Body awareness changes. The patient reconnects with their own body. This is how touch creates clinical change.

Here's the key insight: When you can name what's happening in the patient's nervous system, you can measure it. You can verify it. You can defend it as clinical evidence.

This is what transforms hands-on assessment from intuition into measurement.

This is Week 2 of 10 in the HODA-A™ series: The Science Behind the Hands.

What does your training emphasize — what touch does for the patient, or what touch does in the clinician? 👇

Drop a comment. Let's build this conversation together.

📍 drjoabbott.com/hoda-a
🎯 Follow for Week 3

26/05/2026

I got over 50 reactions on my posts last week! Thanks everyone for your support! 🎉 the conversation IS happening!!!

Something important is getting lost in the conversation about therapeutic touch — and it's a distinction that changes ho...
20/05/2026

Something important is getting lost in the conversation about therapeutic touch — and it's a distinction that changes how we understand clinical training. 🧠

The posts about touch are excellent. The engagement is brilliant. Practitioners are finally feeling that their hands-on work has real scientific validity.
But there's a distinction that keeps being missed.

We're using one word — "touch" — to describe two fundamentally different clinical processes.
Passive touch asks: what happens when the patient is touched? Their nervous system receives, interprets, and responds.
Active touch asks: what happens in the clinician when they touch? Their nervous system senses, explores, discriminates, interprets, and adapts.

Both are clinically important. Both involve the nervous system. But they are not the same clinical event.

The current conversation is doing a brilliant job explaining the first. It's almost silent on the second.
And without understanding the second, we can't fully explain how skilled clinicians gather, filter, and interpret clinical information through touch.

This is the distinction at the heart of HODA-A™ — the calibration framework I've developed to reframe hands-on assessment as structured, defensible clinical measurement.

The clinician is not simply delivering an intervention.
The clinician is the measurement instrument.

This is Week 1 of a 10-week series exploring the science behind hands-on clinical assessment.

I'd love to know — in your clinical training, which received more focus: what touch does to the patient, or what touch does in the clinician?

drjoabbott.com/hoda-a

Follow-up for anyone interested in the upcoming Science of Touch series.Over the next 10 weeks, I’ll be posting regularl...
13/05/2026

Follow-up for anyone interested in the upcoming Science of Touch series.

Over the next 10 weeks, I’ll be posting regularly across Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Instagram
Tuesday — 7:00am
Thursday — 12:30pm
Saturday — 9:00am

LinkedIn + Facebook
Wednesday — 8:00am

Instagram will be shorter and more visual.

LinkedIn and Facebook will go deeper into the science, evidence, clinical reasoning and implications for hands-on practice.

If there is anything specific you would like me to address during the series, please message me.

25/02/2026

If practitioners are to be held accountable for their clinical decisions, then researchers must also be accountable for how clinician-generated data is evaluated.

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